https://nitter.net/TarikCyrilAmar/status/1678332708227895297

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    What’s your plan here, move the entire Russian army into the Donbas and wait to be bombed off the map?

    No. Move the ethnic Russian civilians out of the Donbas and onto Russian soil, so they're out of range of Ukranian artillery.

    Russia meanwhile took nearly a decade to respond

    By doing the exact same unforced error at several orders of magnitude higher death toll. We went from the Ukrainians killing people by the dozen to Russians killing populations by the thousand. This did nothing to improve the situation of the civilians in the Donbas. And two years after the conflict started, we're left with hundreds of thousands dead for... what?

    What has the Russian invasion actually accomplished? You can't even claim it got rid of the fascists. Azov and its ilk are as prolific as ever. The Donbas is a giant kill zone. The Russian government is less stable than its ever been. The western half of Ukraine is a giant black market for surplus arms between fascist groups. The Scandinavian states are lining up to join NATO, while the rest of Europe is gearing up for a third World War. Ethnic Russians are increasingly the subject of a global hate campaign.

    What did the invasion accomplish? Show me one thing that was actually improved by this reckless and foolish decision.

    • edge [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      No. Move the ethnic Russian civilians out of the Donbas and onto Russian soil, so they're out of range of Ukranian artillery.

      "Just cooperate in Ukraine's ethnic cleansing of the Donbass."

      • CannotSleep420
        ·
        1 year ago

        "I have no counterargument, so I'm going to deflect by distorting something you said to make you look bad."

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Bro this ain't a small collection of villages we're talking about, the maps can distort the reality, Donbass is a massive heavily populated region, millions of people and a multitude of large cities, there's no other way to slice it, it would've been a self-inflicted ethnic cleansing lmao

          And should they have done the same for Crimea? There is no escaping the confrontation, it was set the minute the fascists pulled the coup

          • CannotSleep420
            ·
            1 year ago

            I agree with his point, but that's not going to stop me from being a snarky contrarian debatebro when I see a good opening to attack.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Telling the M.S. St. Louis to turn around and go back to Europe, because otherwise we're cooperating with the Nazis.

        • edge [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Those were people trying to escape. If ethnic Russians wanted to leave the Donbass, they could have done so already, or at least asked for it. Forcing them to leave against their will isn't the same thing.

          • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Turning the Russian army to the purpose of evacuating and providing relief to Donbas refugees to facilitate a smooth exit would have been an infinitely better use of Russian money and manpower than launching a suicide mission across the border.

            Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared. The economy of border towns would have surged. Half of North Africa wouldn't be facing a famine due to destruction of arable land. Russian and Belarusian borders would have been well-fortified, rather than juggling the egos of a bunch of rebellious mercenaries. And we wouldn't be debating how many mines and cluster bombs to scatter across the Eastern European interior, to plague generations to come.

            • edge [he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              evacuating and providing relief to Donbas refugees to facilitate a smooth exit

              You mean forcibly deporting. Because that's what it would be.

            • Parzivus [any]
              ·
              1 year ago

              suicide mission

              Evidently not, they're winning by all metrics except perhaps "not winning fast enough"

              • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
                ·
                1 year ago

                Nothing about this bloodbath constitutes "winning". Hundreds of thousands of people are dead. The repeated failed harvests are threatening regional famine. We're looking at economic damage well into the tens of billions, assuming the war were to end tomorrow, and trillions going into the future. Military budgets across the continent are surging, as European leadership is whipped into an anti-Russo panic.

                All this so two legions of mercenaries can play artillery tag across the Donbas basin? How is that winning?

                • Parzivus [any]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  People usually die in wars, not sure what you were expecting.
                  NATO literally does not have the ability to sustain this war. They could get there, if they were not neoliberal hellholes, but they are. Their military industries are build around making overpriced, wildly complex equipment that is sometimes good enough to kill insurgents and not nearly good enough for symmetrical warfare. No amount of money can fix this.
                  Russia, while also being something of a neolib trash fire, still has enough Soviet infrastructure to produce in months what takes years in other nations, and they will eventually win the conflict. Whether that will be just the Donbass or a full annexation or somewhere in between remains to be seen.

                  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    NATO literally does not have the ability to sustain this war.

                    The Western MIC can keep churning out hardware forever. There is no upper limit to the number of bombs we can manufacture, just the rate.

                    Russia, while also being something of a neolib trash fire, still has enough Soviet infrastructure to produce in months what takes years in other nations

                    It doesn't matter, when one bomb can level a city block. We're approaching a point at which there simply will not be anything left worth bombing.